And yet the vivid reality of what they were attempting seemed absurd to her. A more desperate act by so inadequate a group was hard to imagine. Her first reaction was to confront them head-on, and she actually took five or six steps down the staircase as if she were not afraid. But they kept on coming, a ridiculous slow-motion coup straight out of a B-horror film: arthritic knees lifting, flaccid arms pulling on the banister, fingers catching on steps. Ruta's obscenely small mouth strained for air, and runty Beverly struggled to get both feet on each step behind Helen the Hunchback.
Ariel balked. Farce or not, she did not like their intensity or the very fact that they were unafraid. Better to retreat to the studio. Put a heavy oak door between her and them. But as she turned, her eyes came up sharply to the wheelchair that sat poised at the top of the stairs. Massive and shaggy, her invalid husband leered down at her.
"Wait for me, dear!" Thomas Leppa rumbled, and yanking as hard as he could he launched the big silver wheels over the edge.
The heavy chair plunged straight at Ariel, thrusting her husband upright, his arms outflung to prevent any possibility of her escape. But the right footrest caught the second step, pivoting the wheelchair on its side and altering its trajectory. Ariel was already losing her balance when a flailing hand clutched the throat of her blouse. It was an irresistible force, and she spun after her attacker while the misdirected chair tumbled to the landing. She fell elbow first against the small of his back, and she actually heard the snapping of the vertebrae, though she couldn't tell whose. But the two of them rode only a couple of steps before he slid out from under, leaving her gently sprawled halfway down the flight.
She had hit her lip and now she tasted blood, tasted reality. The blur of open rebellion rising from the lower level was palpably real now. By the time Molly and Paavo were past the upended wheelchair and Thomas Leppa's grotesquely twisted body, Ariel had crawled ponderously to the top step on the third floor.
She threw one white-eyed glance over her shoulder as she gained her feet, then hobbled toward the studio. A chill went through her as she fumbled for the key in the pocket of her slacks. Where was it? Lying on the staircase? An ironic premonition of her death falling from the window of the studio as she had intended the night she first mixed the paint flashed through her mind. But then her fingers closed around the key, and that little triumph infected her with insane glee. She was actually giggling as she unlocked the door.
"Do you know what you've just thrown away?" she shouted to the climbers on the stairs. Then stepping into the studio, she slammed the door thunderously and set the lock.
But once inside she began to cry. Shudders racked her bony form and the warm salty tears that coursed down her withered cheeks felt like blood draining out of her. Faintness swept in. She staggered to her workbench and collapsed beside it with a final dry sob.
Why had everything gone so wrong for her? She had been at the bottom of the food chain and at the top, and each time she had been devoured by the ravenous pack. There was no reason for it except capriciousness. It was as simple as that. Children on a playground nearly three-quarters of a century removed had decided at a glance that she lacked the symmetry and grace of the rest of them. So they had practiced their own "natural selection" ever since. And nothing – absolutely nothing she could ever hope to do – was going to change that.
And suddenly, as if giving voice to the utter frustration of that, there was a scream. The fact that it was a distant scream from deep within the walls of the house failed to register. More screams followed – frantic and rising. She thought they were coming from the horrorstruck collection of damned souls at her locked door. Like a raft of doomed sinners they had arrived on Charon's ferry to the far shore of the river Styx, and now their screaming drove the self-pity out of her mind, because it was their turn to suffer the full consequences . . . .
"You've lost!" she shrieked, half rising, half scrabbling to the door. "Long, long lives and you threw them all away!"
She landed on the inner panel as if she had been hurled, and she spoke hoarsely into the wood, letting it resonate her condemnation and her laments to the faithless inhabitants of New Eden on the other side.
"I gave you a chance to redeem yourselves, and you were too selfish, too proud, too weak to take it. I cared . . . I cared enough to let you back, and all you could do was look down on me. Do you think I'm made of stone? Ariel the Leper? Ariel the Doormat?”
The first blow jarred her a step back. It was Paavo hitting the middle of the door with the hammer she had seen him carrying. But the wood was thick and Paavo was weak. He could pound until he dropped and the door would hold.
"Do you know what I'm going to do now?" she amplified more loudly still. "I'm going to make you so hideous that you'll wish for hell again. Did you hear me, Ruta? You think Marjorie is a festering ruin? Wait till you're too weak to brush the worms out of your sores. Wait until your bowels leak and your skin is so thin that it bursts when you move. You'll wish for hell to save you from me!"
More blows. From metal objects this time. And fists. But Ariel Leppa set about getting the portraits ready.
She would paint them as she had described: a rogue's gallery of living agony that would put the ugliness of their souls on their outward bodies. Fit company for Dorian Gray! And if, by some chance, they were able to beat down the door before the changes could dry, she would have open containers of paint ready to spill over their images, obliterating them forever.
But the hammering on the door suddenly stopped of its own accord, too suddenly to be exhaustion. Ariel heard movement as if they were stepping aside. But for who? Or what?
And now there came a thin, gritty thud in the center of the panel so impotent that she almost laughed. Only why were the others letting this weak assault take over? And then she remembered something else that one of them had been carrying, and she knew . . .
Kraft Olson was casting his hand in her assassination. The knife he carried came out of the door and went in again and again. Plunging, plunging. He didn't need to get any closer than that to wound Ariel Leppa to the heart. The very futility of it spoke of his passion. So vindictive.
The pain that instantly bubbled up inside her was blind. It hurt as it had hurt her entire life, and she reacted with equally blind rage, wanting to lash out as she was still learning to do. She wanted to tell Kraft how Danielle had suffered, how ugly his chosen one had become before her final annihilation. But she couldn't. Because she felt uglier than any of those travesties she had perpetrated on Danielle. Ugly and hated.
A tremendous agony filled her mind and body now, so paramount that she feared she could not exist another instant if she examined it. Everyone and everything had betrayed her. Even the agony threatened to betray her by yielding reasons she didn't want to hear. So she let the outrage that lay at the bottom of her heart scream it down—that ravenous outrage that had cowered mute all her life while it bloated itself with accumulated hurts. Such a scream it had pent up. Filling her mind so completely that it deafened and blinded her. And she was glad because she could no longer hear the knife in the door. And she was glad she couldn't see Kraft's face. And more important than even that, she was glad he couldn't see hers.
Chapter 31
The soles of Amber's bare feet tingled, and the cotton nightshirt that ended at her calves felt like a wind tunnel exposing her to every breath of heat rising in the duct. That she could actually feel heat from the nightmarish reptile behind her, that its scorching breath would touch her naked heels first when it caught her, seemed rational. A red serpent, a flickering flame for a tongue—its whole aspect was heat. Burning fangs would close around the tendon at the back of her foot, and she would be dragged down, already feverish from the poison that would paralyze her as the giant snake began to swallow and digest her in the hot acids of its stomach.
She caught the vanilla smell of the gutted candles then, and it was funny, but that sane association with unbaked cherry pies and cookie dough r
ekindled her with a hope as strong as fear. She began to climb furiously in the dark: hand following hand, foot following foot, grasping, pressing, clinging to successive ridges where sections of the old chases and newer ductwork met. She thrummed her way upward, listening beneath the reverberations for pursuit. And the unfairness of the fact that the snake didn't make any sound at all made her want to cry.
Her response to the next hint of light in a connecting shaft was just as desperate. She scrambled onto the horizontal and banged her way to the grillwork. There would be no time to go back on this one. The red serpent would be on her at the juncture of the ducts. And then she saw that it was a second-floor bedroom that was used to store books and boxes. One of the boxes sat on half the floor grid, and from the way it bulged, she knew it was heavy. She got her feet up on the lattice and braced her shoulders. But one futile push was all it took to know she would never move it.
So now the panic hit her like ice dripping from the top of her spine to the pit of her stomach. Which way to go? The red snake might be up to the connecting shaft by now. She tried to remember where the registers were in the second-floor rooms, tried to figure where the duct might go. It would be a dead end, she thought, and before she could reason that any direction was going to be a dead end, she had started back to the vertical chase. But moving toward darkness was disorienting, and in her haste she miscalculated. Reaching out, she brought her right hand down into nothingness. Like a slow surface dive into a black lake, she pitched headlong into the shaft.
The fact that she stiffened her legs, which were still in the horizontal duct, was what saved her. She was rigid when her shoulder jarred against the opposite side. Pain radiated from her waist to her neck as her right hand clawed for a seam and her left grasped the horizontal lip of the crossing. She pushed, wriggling backward one awkward inch at a time until her hips were supported and she could rest both elbows on the opposite edge.
But now her body was bridging the intersection with her stomach bowed downward as if to invite the scaly red creature below to strike. She thought about all the high places she had climbed, roofs and trees and a lightning rod, and here she was inside a simple long box that had edges like a ladder on all four sides. All she had to do was get her feet under her. Her arms felt like rags and her spine like straw as with one last trembling effort she pushed herself upright.
Bruised and scraped, she positioned herself across the emptiness again and once more started to climb. But the surge of adrenaline abandoned her after a few feet, and another wave of nausea made her want to just let go. Maybe she would be unconscious before she was eaten. Maybe she would crush the snake. She thought she could hear her heart thudding. But then – no – it was pounding overhead. Her mother’s voice. Yelling something. Not a cry for help. Something drawn out and angry.
Too exhausted and sick with terror to figure it out, her fingers feeling less and less, she climbed leadenly, mechanically, until at last she came to the third-floor crossing and saw another pocket of light like the others. This would be it. Endgame.
The meager light threw a pattern across her face as she dragged herself a few feet into the shaft behind a wall register. Again she got her feet against it, her shoulders braced. But this grid wouldn't budge either. And then she saw the room beyond, and it was the studio, and there was her mother.
Chapter 32
The banging resumed with such fury that, despite the thickness of the door, it alarmed Ariel. She twisted to see before realizing that it wasn't coming from the door but from the inner wall near the baseboard. How the hell had her murderous rebellion gotten in there? She scuttled to the radiator grid on the wall and stooped far enough to make out a tear-stained face and battered fingers.
“Amber?” Impossible. “Amber.” Possible. More than possible. “What are you doing?”
"Let me out."
Let her out? That would be letting her in. Then what?
"Let me out!" Bare feet tattooed against the grid, sending flakes of loose paint from the plaster around the frame. "Let me out, let me out, let me out!"
"Stop it!"
But it didn't stop. Her brash young daughter had never been this frantic before. It half persuaded her that the others had done something to her. Maybe Amber wasn't on their side after all. And the child would have the grid broken out of the plaster in another minute.
"All right, all right, I'll get you out. But then you have to climb out the window and get something to fight them with. Get them away from the door. Do you understand?
"Yes, yes, anything – hurry!"
Ariel had a small metal spatula for working paint, and this she applied to the slotted screws one by one. But the fourth screw was still partially threaded into the plaster when Amber added a final kick to the effort and the grid shot off. The child tumbled out then.
Ariel was struck by the spectacle. Two small patches of her nightshirt were blood soaked, and her hair was matted and powdered like a nineteenth-century periwig. More crimson trickled through the caked dust between her bare toes, as if it flowed up from wounds on the soles of her feet, and dust obliterated the pattern of her nightshirt where it covered her knees. Her arms hung limp and her shoulders sagged as she stumbled toward the door.
"Not that way. Out the window I said."
“Why?”
“Can’t you hear them? They’re after me. They want to kill me!”
For the first time, Amber understood; but her eyes flicked to the open duct on the wall.
“If you stay here, you’ll die anyway,” she said.
“Not if you go out the window and get something to attack them with.”
"I can't."
"What do you mean, you can't? You've been up and down on that lightning rod, and you can reach it from this window as easily as from the sewing room."
Then, before Ariel could stop her, Amber pattered to the door and turned the key.
Had the seven who stood in the corridor known what to expect they might have forced their way past the child in the doorway, but the rattling in the lock was taken as a sign that Ariel was coming out. Whether in surrender or with a weapon, it would be Ariel, so they backed away. And when Amber stood there they were distracted just long enough for Ariel to push the child into them, slam the door and twist the key again.
Dismay turned to anger.
"Now look what you've done!" Ruta blistered.
"I didn't do anything. I opened the door for you."
"You're just like your mother. . . ."
"No—"
"You painted those creatures," Molly said. "You made the thing that got Paavo the first time."
"You made the scarecrow," Dana added.
"Yes, but I didn't know they were going to hurt anyone."
They had her hemmed in, and Paavo took her by the arm. "How did you get out of the cellar?" he demanded.
"We're sorry, child," Helen said. "But we can't let you go. You've got the paint."
“I don't want it anymore,” Amber murmured with resignation. Her weary gaze swept the gray faces and stopped on Helen Hoverstein. “If you want it, I'll tell you where it is.”
And as if that offer devastated Ariel behind the locked door, the studio suddenly erupted in shrieks. Something overturned; something else clattered as if hurled; glass shattered.
Only Amber understood.
Her mother was throwing things, breaking the window to see if there was a way to escape. Not from the other members of the household, of course. She was trying to get away from her worst nightmare. Because it was coming through the open wall register now—it—and she really hated snakes. . . .
When the key rattled in the lock this time, the ravaged insurgents of New Eden were ready. They took hold of Ariel Leppa the instant she stumbled out, and it seemed unreal that they actually had their hands on the cause of their damnation and that her power over them could be at an end. Paavo let go of Amber, who for the moment was forgotten. What did the offspring matter when you had the queen bee? Not
hing, unless you believed in royal succession. And perhaps they should have. Because the daughter of the queen suddenly jumped back into the studio that held the dust of Eden, the paint that it had potentiated, and all their portraits, and locked the door behind her.
The red serpent was gone. In the turmoil, Amber had stolen a look in the studio to see how imminent the threat was and caught a last glimpse of it rippling back into the duct. For a moment she was uncertain. Why hadn't it attacked everyone? Then again, it lived in the cellar; it could have attacked before and didn't. It was almost like it had been after her mother alone and now her mother was caught. So Amber took her chance—hadn't Ruta said she was just like her mother—darting back into the studio and locking the door.
Once before she had been in the studio alone with the paints. She had thought then that if she could get good enough like her mother, she would paint her father healthy again and then he would be able to get out of his wheelchair. But she hadn't gotten good enough. Instead she had unleashed a bunch of hideous things that didn't fit in, things that had no way to survive without killing. They were like Miss Hoverstein's pygmies who married each other and whose babies were all deformed or had sick brains, and so the world shouldn't have them anymore. Only, her monsters weren't going to let themselves die out voluntarily. They had to be killed.
But now that she was actually in the studio again, she realized the choices more clearly. You're just like your mother. Yes. In some ways. She had the artistic ability that ran in the family. And she could learn the rest. And she had all of the paints now. She could do it. Here were the pictures. She could paint them all out. Then she would practice, practice, practice with just regular paint—all day long, if she wanted—until she got good enough to use the magic paints. She would start again with a different world. She would paint Aarfie back, and her dad, and any friends she wanted. Maybe even a sister. That's what she would do. Could do.
Dust of Eden Page 28
